


Doctor Who and the Rambaldi Enigma

by Rheanna



Category: Alias, Doctor Who
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crossover, Female Protagonist, Gen, Time Travel, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-29
Updated: 2007-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:45:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rheanna/pseuds/Rheanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I've done this kind of thing a lot," Sydney said, "and this is definitely the first time this has happened."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doctor Who and the Rambaldi Enigma

**Author's Note:**

> Written as Christmas giftfic for Yahtzee in December 2007. Thanks to Counteragent for beta'ing.

**ONE**

  
Getting into the Vatican was the easy part. Gaining access to its vast underground network of libraries and document repositories -- well, that had been more of a challenge, but Sydney had managed it thanks to some nun's robes and a set of rosary beads which emitted tranquilizing gas when warmed to body temperature. Locating the mission objective, however, was proving to be more difficult than anyone at the CIA had thought it would be.

Sydney opened the door of yet another ancient, dusty vault and shone her flashlight inside. "It's not this one either. How much longer until security is due to sweep through here again?"

"Four minutes."

"We need to find this before I have to try to convince anyone I took a wrong turn looking for a concordance."

Her earpiece -- well-concealed underneath the headgear of her nun's habit -- hissed softly for a second, then Vaughn's voice replied, "Okay, wait, Marshall's got a theory that we've been reading the co-ordinates wrong. He thinks --"

Before Vaughn could continue, Marshall's voice broke in on the line: "I just figured it out. I mean, I don't know how I missed it, it really should've been obvious -- I guess it's one of those things, it's clear as day as soon you see it, but while you're looking it's a complete mystery. Like a word-search puzzle. Do you ever do word-search puzzles? I do; they're relaxing, you know? Uh, okay, off topic, sorry. Anyway: the co-ordinates in Rambaldi's letter aren't co-ordinates, they're logarithmic products expressed in the form of co-ordinates. I just need to work back to get to the real grid reference."

Vaughn's voice: "How long?"

"A minute, tops. I'm on it."

Sydney leaned against the nearest stack of books. She exhaled, and saw her breath mist in front of her face. The air was cool, and she was grateful for the long sleeves and full skirt of the habit. It wasn't the most practical garment for running in, but it had distinct advantages as far as warmth and places to conceal things were concerned.

The open vault in front of her was at the end of a thin corridor whose walls were two high shelves of ancient ledgers and parchments. Another narrow alleyway, bounded by another wall of shelves, ran parallel to it, and after that another, and after that the pattern was repeated hundreds or possibly even thousands of times. The only source of light in the immediate vicinity came from a bare light-bulb screwed into a fixture on the wall; beyond its limited range the darkness was absolute. Sydney shivered a little, and didn't completely succeed in convincing herself it was purely due to the cold. "It's creepy down here."

"As soon as Marshall figures out the grid reference in Rambaldi's letter, you can get the Path and get out of there."

The sound of another voice -- especially Vaughn's -- was reassuring. "What do you think it is? The Path, I mean."

She could hear the half-sigh in his voice when he replied. "A ball of levitating fluid, a beating heart… who knows? Where Rambaldi's concerned, I've given up trying to guess. All I know is, Sloane wants it, which means we have to get to it first."

"You know, most of the time I manage to forget how weird all this is," Sydney said, "but when I think about it -- really think about it -- I realise how crazy everything about Rambaldi is. How could some guy in fifteenth century Italy know everything he did? Make the predictions he did?"

"Every so often, the gene pool throws up a genius. Look at Leonardo Da Vinci."

"There's a big difference between painting the Mona Lisa and figuring out the secret of immortality. And Leonardo Da Vinci never predicted the future, either."

"That bothers you, doesn't it? The prophecies. Page forty-seven."

Sydney didn't answer for a second. Then she said, "I believe in making choices. I don't -- I won't -- believe that all we're doing is following a five-hundred year old set of instructions, like Rambaldi's clockwork toys."

At that moment Marshall broke in excitedly. "Got it! It's about thirty yards away from you, north-west."

"Moving," Sydney said, her focus shifting instantly back to the mission. She moved swiftly between the stacks of manuscripts, silently counting off her paces until she arrived at what had to be the right intersection. The vault door in front of her looked exactly the same as any one of the others she had already opened, and she hoped Marshall's interpretation of the code in the Rambaldi letter was right. If it wasn't, she didn't have time to look anywhere else. "I'm here. Going in now."

The vault door was carved from a single piece of wood, heavy and solid, but its lock was a simple iron loop and a knotted leather cord. It was typical of Rambaldi, Sydney thought, to hide the location of the Path in a coded grid reference in invisible ink on the reverse side of a letter to his patron, and then to leave its hiding place unprotected. It was almost as if the inventor had wanted whoever solved his riddle to claim the Path as their rightful prize. Almost, Sydney thought suddenly, as if he'd wanted _her_ to have it.

_Whoa, back up there, Syd._ It had been a mistake to let her focus slip while she'd been talking to Vaughn. Her job was to find and retrieve Rambaldi's work, not think about the man or his motivations.

She eased the leather knot loose and opened the vault door.

At first glance, this vault seemed to be just like the others she had checked. The dim light bulb cast its faint glow on to the piles of ancient church documents and ledgers which packed the shelves lining the small room.

But there was something else here, too. An object sat on the shelf facing the door, nestling in between the piles of fusty papers. It was a glass sphere, no more than six inches in diameter. There was a wooden bracket attached to each side of the globe, as if the designer had intended to provide handles. The brackets were symmetrical, each one taking the form of two straight pieces of wood pinching the sphere then tapering together until they met at a sharp point. The overall shape was absolutely unmistakeable: together the sphere and brackets formed a three-dimensional Eye of Rambaldi.

"It's here," she said. "I've found the Path."

"Good work," Vaughn said. "Is it going to be hard to move it?"

"No -- it's not large. It looks delicate, though." She stepped into the small, low-ceilinged room, pulling the door shut behind her. Moving closer to where the Path sat on its ledge, she saw that the glass sphere wasn't empty. The transparent globe formed the housing for what looked like a complex clockwork device -- Sydney could see tiny gears meshing together, like the inside of a watch. "It looks like a snow-globe, with handles on either side. There's some kind of mechanism inside it."

She reached up to lift the Path down, taking hold of the device with both hands by its wooden brackets. As she did so, the tiny gears in the clockwork mechanism inside the sphere began to move.

Her gasp must have been audible even over the radio channel, because Vaughn said, "What is it?"

"It's doing something," Sydney said. The gears were moving more quickly now, and she could feel the device humming in her grip, tiny vibrations passing up into her wrists and arms. "It activated when I lifted it."

"It's booby-trapped," Vaughn said. "Put it down and get out of there. Syd --"

The radio went suddenly dead. Sydney stared in horror at the device she was holding. After lying inert in a vault for nearly five centuries, and with no visible source of power, Rambaldi's device was swiftly becoming as bright as a signal flare. The glass sphere was invisible now, indistinguishable within the glowing ball of light emanating from it.

There was nothing for it: she would have to destroy the Path. Sydney raised her arms, intending to smash the device on the vault floor, but found she couldn't release her hold on the wooden brackets -- time was slowing down, grinding to a halt, and she was slowing down with it, rooted to the spot in this single frozen moment. The light was so bright now that it filled the vault entirely, bleaching out everything into a uniform sea of whiteness. Sydney screwed her eyes shut in an effort to avoid being blinded.

"I can't shut it down," she said into her radio. Her voice sounded weirdly distorted even to her own ears, deep and slurred, like a record played at too slow a speed. "I think it's gonna --"

_\-- explode. _

The blast came, but it was like no explosion Sydney had ever experienced before. Instead of noise and heat, there was only light -- light which surrounded her and filled her until she felt that she had become nothing but light herself. For an instant she was floating, bodiless, adrift in endless light. She just had time to think that if this was dying, it wasn't so terrible after all, when suddenly the light was gone, and she was back in the vault, lying on her back on the floor, her hands outstretched and empty.

For several long seconds, all she could see were after-images from the explosion seared on to the backs of her retinas. No matter whether she closed her eyes or opened them, all she saw was the outline of the Path, Rambaldi's ghostly eye, looming in front of her. While she waited for her night-vision to return, Sydney sat up and felt around for the shattered remains of the Path.

What she found surprised her. Somehow, the Path hadn't broken in the blast -- it was the first thing her exploring fingers touched. As soon as she made contact with the smooth glass sphere, Sydney snatched her hand back, in case she triggered it again. But it only lay passively at her feet, and after a couple of seconds she reached out and lifted it by one of the wooden brackets.

She stood up as soon as she was able to. Her fake robes had a deep pocket which had been sewn into them for exactly the purpose of concealing the Path, and it vanished as soon as she slipped it between the voluminous folds. Then she put a hand underneath the wimple of her nun's habit and pushed the earpiece of her radio set back into place. "This is Mountaineer. Respond, please." There was nothing but silence on the line, and she wondered if an element of the effect created by the Path had been an electromagnetic pulse. That made sense, especially since the vault's electric light had been knocked out by the explosion.

There was a noise from outside, and the door of the vault began to move. As it swung open, Sydney briefly considered what to do. Concealment was impossible -- there was simply nowhere to hide in the small room -- so she decided to brazen it out. She just had time to clasp her hands in front of her and compose her face into an expression of relief -- exactly the opposite of what she was really feeling -- before the door opened.

The man standing in the vault's entrance was tall, with a shock of white hair and an angular, somewhat patrician face. Oddly, he was carrying an oil lamp instead of a flashlight, which he set down on the edge of the shelf nearest to the door. He looked at Sydney -- studying her, she realised -- with an intelligent, suspicious gaze. _Trouble,_ she thought, but it was too late to change her strategy now.

"I'm so glad someone found me!" she exclaimed, in the lilting Irish accent which was part of her cover. "I was looking for a manuscript and I got completely lost down here and I was beginning to think I was going to have to shout for help. Do you know the way out?"

There was a beeping sound, and the white-haired man raised his hand. He was holding a small device which looked like a metallic wand, and its beeping was growing louder and more rapid as he pointed it in Sydney's direction. "Where is it?" he demanded.

"Now, I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Sydney said, feigning confusion along with a brogue. Underneath the habit, meanwhile, she was shifting her posture into an attack stance.

"The device," the man said impatiently. "Come on, I know you must have it. It is imperative you give it to me _at once."_

Sydney leapt at him.

The white-haired man should've been easy to overpower -- although he had an advantage over Sydney in height, she was used to taking on opponents who were stronger and taller than she was. It was easy, usually, to turn their strength against them with a well-chosen move, and even easier given that most of the men she fought tended to assume that a woman would not be a challenge.

She knew at once that she'd made a mistake. When she grabbed the white-haired man, she expected him to try to throw her, which would allow her to turn his attack against him. But he didn't -- instead he seemed to lock into position, absorbing her strike instead of returning it. Trying the more direct approach, she spun on her heel and aimed a kick at his chest; he caught her ankle effortlessly, in spite of her speed, and a second later Sydney found herself caught in a vice-like grip. She struggled, but it was no use -- she couldn't move.

"Venusian karate," the white-haired man said. "It comes in very useful."

From somewhere outside the vault, Sydney heard shouts, and the sound of running footsteps, growing rapidly closer.

"That sounds like security," she said in her normal accent, "and I'm guessing you're not supposed to be here any more than I am."

"Very true," the white-haired man acknowledged. "Now listen to me: I don't know what you're doing here, but in the very short term I am sure you have as little desire to be on the wrong end of a Vatican guard's sword as I do, which means our goals are, for now, congruent. So answer one question, and please be truthful -- _do you have it?"_

Sydney took a breath, held it, considered the options. "Yes."

"Then I propose we pool our resources, make a hasty exit, and continue our discussion outside."

"Deal," Sydney said, and the white-haired man released her.   
"This way," he said. "Follow me."

He set off at a run, and Sydney followed him, hoisting up the skirt of her habit so she could move more quickly. The white-haired man was unexpectedly fast, and although Sydney could easily keep up with him, she was surprised that he didn't seem to have any difficulty keeping up with her.

As they dashed along the thin corridors between the stacks, Sydney looked over her shoulder to see how far behind their pursuers were. She expected the men chasing them to be wearing the distinctive blue and yellow striped uniform of the Vatican guard, but instead they were dressed in what looked like leather jerkins, and they were waving short, dagger-like swords as they ran.

_What the hell?_

"Here," the white-haired man said.

He ducked into an alcove, and when Sydney followed him she found herself at the base of a stone spiral staircase. The white-haired man began to climb the stairs, two steps at a time, and Sydney went after him. From below, she heard the sword-waving soldiers' voices grow louder, then fainter again. They must have assumed that their quarry had run on, deeper into the maze of shelves.

Sydney felt fresh air on her face, and a few moments later she was outside, standing in a small courtyard with a fountain at its centre. The night sky above was cloudless, and a bright moon illuminated the water lapping at the fountain's lip with a silvery glow. The white-haired man started to walk towards the arch in the courtyard's far wall.

"Wait," Sydney said. She checked her watch, just to be sure. "It can't be night-time. It's only four in the afternoon."

"You must know to expect a certain amount of temporal dissonance," the white-haired man said. He frowned. "Or haven't you done this kind of thing before?"

"I've done this kind of thing a lot," Sydney said, "and this is definitely the first time this has happened."

In fact, the sudden darkness wasn't the only weird thing. During the flight to Italy, Sydney had committed a map of the Vatican to memory, but as she looked around she realised that the courtyard they were standing in didn't correspond to the layout in her head. They couldn't have run more than a couple of hundred yards, so where were they? Sydney's intention had been to ditch her new acquaintance as soon as they were outside, but now she was disoriented and without her radio she couldn't afford the extra seconds it would take to figure out where she was relative to the pick-up. For now, it looked like her best option was to play along.

"Come along," the white-haired man said impatiently. "No time to dawdle."

Together, they made their way through a series of shadowy courtyards within the Vatican. None of the buildings seemed to have its night time floodlights switched on, and the palace windows were also strangely and uniformly dark. Her guess about the Path emitting an electromagnetic pulse must have been right, Sydney thought, and wondered how far the blackout extended.

"You were very unwise to activate the device," the white-haired man said.

"Believe me, I didn't do it deliberately," Sydney told him. "All I did was pick it up."

He looked sharply at her. "Really? Then you didn't intend to come here?"

"I was sent here," Sydney said. "I have a mission to complete."

"Then we have that much in common. But if I were you, my dear, I would be very cautious about deliberately changing the time-stream. Trying to engineer your own history invariably ends in disaster -- trust me, I've had to deal with the consequences on more than one occasion."

Sydney stopped and held up a hand. "Okay, in the first place, I am not your dear. And, secondly, I have no idea what you're talking about, because the only thing I am here to do is my job. I leave things like changing history to other people."

"I assumed changing history _was_ your job. Why else would you have come to the fifteenth century?"

Sydney stared at him. "What?"

The white-haired man stared at her, his expression bemused. "In my experience, when people steal time machines, it's usually because they want to travel in time." He stopped, as if something had just occurred to him. "You did know the item you took was a time travelling device, didn't you?"

Suddenly, Sydney was very conscious of the weight of the Path, which was still hidden in the deep folds of her nun's habit. Her mouth felt oddly dry. Time travel device?

It wasn't possible. It couldn't be. But, insisted a small voice in the back of her mind, the picture on page forty-seven shouldn't have been possible either. Or the Mueller Sphere or the centuries-old flower or the ever-beating Di Regno Heart.

With Milo Rambaldi, all things were possible.

She hadn't stopped to ask herself why Rambaldi had chosen to name this creation 'The Path'. It seemed all too obvious now.

"Oh, no," she said.

"Ah," said the white-haired man. "My apologies. I thought you knew rather more about what you were doing than it appears you actually do. I'm afraid that you're in for a bit of a shock."

At that moment, they came to the final archway and walked out of the palace and into the street.

A horse and carriage sped by, driven by a servant wearing a brightly coloured tunic and hose. On the other side of the street, a group of men were arguing loudly outside a tavern whose windows were lit by oil lamps. There wasn't a streetlight or neon sign anywhere to be seen, and Sydney couldn't hear a single car engine or rumbling truck making a night time delivery.

And in the distance, lit by a moon which was bright and clear in the pollution-free sky, Sydney could see the silhouette of the Colosseum, putting an end to any doubt she could still entertain about the reality of what she was seeing.

Very slowly, she asked, "When is this?"

"It's a rather balmy September in 1496," the man said. He smiled. "Rome during the Renaissance. One of my favourite temporal locations, I have to admit. I used to come here on holiday."

"This," Sydney said at last, "was not in the mission spec."

  


**TWO**

"This is your time machine?" Sydney asked. It was hard to keep the note of scepticism out of her voice.

"Hush, now," the white-haired man said. He patted the blue police box reassuringly. "The TARDIS has feelings, you know."

"Of course it does," Sydney said wearily. "Anything else I should know before I go in there?"

The answer to that, it turned out, was an emphatic 'yes'. Inside, the blue police box time machine was bigger -- much, much bigger -- than it had looked from without. The room Sydney stepped into was empty, apart from a mushroom-shaped control desk with what looked like the base of a pillar emerging from its centre. The walls were decorated, if that was the right word, with a pattern of recessed roundels. The only item of furniture was a wooden coat-stand.

Intensive training followed by years of field experience had given Sydney the ability to process and respond to new information and situations with barely a cognitive hiccup. It was just as well, because otherwise she suspected she might have needed to find a small corner where she could just rock quietly for a while.

"Let me see the device you stole," the white-haired man said.

The CIA would doubtless have preferred the word 'retrieved', but Sydney didn't correct him. She took the Path out of the habit's pocket and handed it over. He squinted at it, then produced the same metal wand she'd seen him use back in the vault, and pointed it at the Path from different angles. "What are you doing?" she asked. "What is that?"

"Sonic screwdriver," he said, which was hardly enlightening. "Now do be quiet for a minute and let me work, hmmm?"

He continued to tinker with the Path for some time, leaving Sydney with no option but to loiter aimlessly next to the coat-stand. The next time he looked up and saw her, he frowned to himself, as if he'd forgotten she was there. "So who do you work for? The CIA?"

Sydney looked at him, surprised. "Well -- yes."

The frown deepened. "Then you can tell the Celestial Intervention Agency to stop checking up on me. I may have no choice about doing what they tell me, but I'd prefer to be left alone to get on with it, thank you very much."

"Uh, actually, I work for the other CIA. The American one."

"You have nothing to do with the Time Lords?"

That sounded like the name of a 1970s prog-rock supergroup, yet somehow Sydney sensed it probably wasn't. "Definitely not."

"How fortunate for you. I suppose I should introduce myself, then. I'm the Doctor." He said it with a tone of finality that strongly implied there wasn't going to be a name to go with the title. A call-sign, she figured.

"I'm Sydney." She held out her hand, and was surprised when, instead of shaking it, he lifted and gently kissed it. For a time-traveller, the Doctor was strangely -- but charmingly -- old-fashioned.

"A very pretty name," he said as he straightened up. "Like the city."

"Like the city," Sydney agreed, then realised, with a lurch, that Sydney-the-city didn't exist yet -- and wasn't going to exist for at least another three centuries. Los Angeles, New York, the United States of America -- they were all just meaningless strings of words here. More than that, everyone she knew -- her father, Vaughn, Will and Francie, Dixon and Marshall and even Sloane -- was absent from this world. The CIA and SD-6 were nothing more than arrangements of letters and numbers. Everything that Sydney was -- every measure by which she defined her life -- had been erased.

No, it was even worse, because for a thing to be erased it had to exist in the first place, and Sydney's twenty-first century reality had not even been dreamt of in this time and place. It was strange: although she had yearned almost constantly since Danny's death for the simplicity and freedom of a life without the complex web of lies which had defined her existence for so long, now that she suddenly had it she didn't feel free at all. Only lost.

Her twenty-first century life was messy and imperfect, but it was what she understood and where she belonged and she knew, instinctively, that she had to return to it.

"Look, Doctor, I need to get home. If you can show me how to turn that thing on again, I'll just vanish back to the future and let you get back to -- well, whatever it is you're doing."

"That may be easier said than done," the Doctor said. He pocketed the gadget he'd called a sonic screwdriver and lifted the Path, turning it over in his hands. "This device is innovative -- the design is far in advance of the materials -- but it's still extremely crude. Now, this is interesting."

"What is?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead he said, "I was sent here to find out what's causing some rather powerful fluctuations in chronoton levels in this region of space-time. The TARDIS's instruments pinpointed the source of a strong reverse chronoton flow to a vault underneath the Vatican, and so I went there hoping to identify the cause of the disturbances."

"I travelled back in time from the twenty-first century," Sydney said. Say it fast, and it almost sounded credible. "Five hundred years and change has to count as a pretty big disturbance."

"It does -- but it's _one disturbance_, you see. Singular, not plural. And now that I've examined this device, it's clear to me that it's not powerful enough to explain the wider temporal distortion which is at work. Initially, I thought you were behind whatever's happening, but it seems I was wrong. Which means we have something of a mystery on our hands. An enigma, even." The Doctor's earlier testiness had evaporated completely and he was smiling broadly.

"You look pleased," Sydney remarked.

"Of course I'm pleased. Everyone loves a puzzle, don't they?"

"You should meet my friend Marshall. You two would get on really well." It was warmer inside the TARDIS than it had been outside, and since there seemed little point in maintaining her disguise any more, Sydney took off the habit's wimple and shook her hair free. Then she removed the radio link's earpiece as well -- there wasn't going to be a signal for it to pick up any time soon. "Okay, so the Path is crude, but it still worked. You can fix it and send me back home, right?"

The Doctor was shaking his head. "I'm sorry, I can't. This is a very rudimentary device. Once activated, it's capable of making just one trip, returning to the time and place where it was created. It's like a match -- it can't be struck twice."

"Then forget the Path. Just take me back home in this. " Sydney said, indicating the improbably-sized room they were standing in.

"Well," the Doctor said, "no."

Sydney felt like banging her head against the wall. "Why not?"

"It's very complicated to explain."

Sydney snapped, "Well, I have plenty of time, because my schedule's oddly empty for the next five hundred years!"

The Doctor sighed. When he spoke, he sounded reluctant, as if he was owning up to something he found embarrassing. "I broke some rules -- some foolish, pointless rules, I may add -- and as a result I am currently prevented from travelling as widely or as freely as I would like. "

"You were able to come here."

"Because I was sent here. The Time Lords have a great many rules, and they punish those who break them -- but nevertheless they sometimes find that the greater good requires someone to break their rules for them."

He sounded resentful and more than a little bitter, and Sydney empathised. "Yeah, well, I know what that feels like."

"The only place I could take you is back to where I came from, which is not, unfortunately, your era. I'm sorry. I would help you get home if I could." He sounded genuinely regretful.

"What about that 'wider temporal distortion' you were talking about? Is there any chance that whatever's causing it could get me home?"

The Doctor brightened. "It's a possibility, yes."

"Then where do we start looking?"

He indicated the Path. "Right here. This device isn't the answer, but it's certainly a clue. I think we should begin with you telling me everything you know about this object."

"That won't take long. It was made by a man called Milo Rambaldi." A man who, Sydney realised with a shock, was alive and walking around somewhere not far away, right at this minute. It was a bizarre thought. "Rambaldi was born in about 1444. Officially, he was chief architect to the Pope -- except he was much, much more than just an architect. As far as we can tell, Rambaldi was hands-down the greatest genius who ever lived. I mean, this clockwork time machine here? Is not even that spectacular compared to some of the other things he created. Most of his inventions are way in advance of twenty-first century technology. As a result, the US government is very interested in Rambaldi's work. Of course, so are a lot of other people."

While she had been talking, the Doctor had begun to frown. "What I find curious," he said when she'd finished, "is that this Rambaldi person was supposedly a towering genius, far eclipsing Leonardo Da Vinci, yet I've never heard of him. I've certainly never met him."

Sydney raised an eyebrow. "And you have met Leonardo Da Vinci?"

"Charming chap. A bit scatterbrained, but very enthusiastic. Served wonderful cake."

"You know, I used to think my life was weirder than most people's," Sydney said, "but I've got nothing on you."

The Doctor smiled. "I'll take that as a compliment, coming from an American spy wandering around Renaissance Rome dressed as a nun." His expression became serious again. "But the point stands. I have something of a unique perspective on human history, Sydney: unlike you, I can observe it from the outside. So you'll just have to believe me when I tell you that Milo Rambaldi should not exist."

"Doctor, I understand not wanting to believe Rambaldi existed -- I've spent a lot of time wishing he never had -- but he did."

"Did he?" the Doctor asked. "I wonder."

"What are you talking about?"

The Doctor paced around the edge of the control console. "This Rambaldi fellow has been dropped into history like a stone into a pond, and the ripples are just beginning to be felt at other points in the timestream. The source of the temporal distortion is _Milo Rambaldi himself."_

"So what do we do?"

"To start with, we have to find him -- before humanity's development is changed beyond all recognition."

"I think I know how. You said this is September, 1496, right?" When he nodded, she asked, "Do you know what date it is? It's important."

He checked one of the many dials on the control console. "The fourteenth."

The evening of September 14, 1496. "Dammit, we don't have any time. It's tonight."

"What is?"

Sydney explained, "We found the Path because Rambaldi left clues to its location encoded in the text of a letter he wrote thanking one of his patrons for throwing a ball in his honour. The date of the ball is in the letter -- it's tonight. Rambaldi is there right now."

"Then that's where we're going," the Doctor said. "No time to waste!"

"Wait," Sydney said. She pointed down at her nun's habit. "I'm going to need something more suited to a Renaissance ball. Unless they have strippers in this century too."

"The dressing room's just down the corridor," he said, indicating the control room's internal door. "I'm sure you'll find something in there."

"Your time machine… has a walk-in wardrobe?"

"Well, naturally," he said, sounding somewhat affronted at the suggestion that it might not.

The dressing room, when she found it, was like the storeroom of an upmarket fancy-dress hire shop. There were clothes of every type and from every era, as well as many Sydney couldn't place in any period of history. After hunting around for a while, she found, hanging up between a space suit and a tutu, a gown she hoped wouldn't look too out of place at the end of the fifteenth century. It was cut from a deep red rough silk and had white sleeves which puffed out at the shoulders, and it fitted well enough, once she tightened the laces at its waist. For the finishing touch, she quickly gave her hair a centre parting and pinned it into a loose bun at the nape of her neck.

There was an old-fashioned, free-standing mirror with a wooden frame in the corner of the dressing room. It was mostly hidden under a shawl someone had carelessly draped over it. Sydney pulled the shawl away and saw her reflection for the first time.

She looked exactly like the picture on page forty-seven of the Rambaldi manuscript.

"Very nice," the Doctor said when she returned to the control room. Then he saw her expression and frowned. "Are you quite all right?"

"I'm fine," Sydney said. "It's just… I feel like my life is happening in the wrong order."

The Doctor smiled reassuringly. "Oh, that's more or less inevitable with time travel, I'm afraid. I sometimes run into myself, and I can't begin to tell you how awkward _that_ is."

Sydney took a moment to study the Doctor's ensemble, which included a frilled shirt, a velvet smoking jacket, and an opera cape lined with bright red silk. She tried to imagine in what time and place he would look inconspicuous, and decided there wasn't one. "Aren't you going to change too?"

"My dear," the Doctor said seriously, "when you find your look, you must work it. I shall be going as I am."

"Okay," Sydney said. She took a deep breath. "Then let's go find Milo Rambaldi."

  


**THREE**

  
Sydney had been to a lot of parties, in a professional capacity. Weiss liked to joke that if you took the time to find out, you'd discover that every party anybody ever went to was actually organised by the CIA, simply because so much intelligence gathering went on at them. Parties provided a wealth of opportunities: they were places where people let their guard down, where they drank too much and said things they shouldn't, or didn't notice things they should. Sydney had been to parties in warehouses and penthouses, to masked balls and discos, to receptions and galas.

But she'd never been to a party like this before.

The mansion in which the ball was being held was lit from basement to roof with a multitude of twinkling oil lamps; the absence of electric lights in the surrounding streets magnified the effect a hundredfold. There were footmen stationed at the elegant double-fronted doors, ready to welcome the stream of guests, who were being deposited at the rate of several carriages a minute at the base of the steps leading up to the magnificent dwelling.

"Getting in there without an invitation is going to be tricky," Sydney said. "Okay, here's what we do. I'll look for the servant's entrance. Then I'll come back and --"

She broke off, noticing for the first time that the Doctor was no longer standing at her side. Instead, he was walking at a jaunty pace across the piazza in the direction of the mansion's main entrance. Pausing only to curse under her breath, Sydney ran after him.

"Ever hear of a concept called 'planning'?" she asked as she drew level with the Doctor. "Because that's normally how we do this kind of thing."

"Oh, you sound just like the Brigadier. Improvisation, Sydney! Life is much more interesting when you make it up as you go along." They'd reached the bottom of the steps. The Doctor offered Sydney his arm. "Shall we?"

Other guests were lining up behind them, and Sydney had no choice but to accept his arm and climb the steps with him.

At the door, a footman stopped them. "Good evening, my lord. Your invitation?"

"My invitation," the Doctor said. "Why, yes, of course…" He made a show of patting the various pockets of his velvet jacket. Then he seemed to think of something, and his eyes lit up. He produced a sheet of what looked to Sydney like blank paper and handed it to the servant. "Here you are, my good fellow."

The footman studied the slip of paper for a second, frowning. Then his expression suddenly cleared. "Thank you, my lord," he said as he handed the paper back to the Doctor.

"How did you do that?" Sydney demanded as soon as they were out of earshot.

The Doctor's expression was smug. "Psychic paper. Anyone who looks at it sees what he or she wants to see." He handed her the sheet to inspect. "It comes in very useful at times."

"I just bet it does," Sydney said. She could think of at least twenty applications, just off the top of her head. When she held up the paper, she found it had turned into a postcard of Los Angeles. The message on the other side was in her father's handwriting. It said:

 

_Dear Sydney, _

There's a good explanation for all of this. You're not going insane.

Lots of love, Dad

P.S. I am very proud of you.

 

_Figures,_ Sydney thought. She gave the Doctor back his psychic paper, and he tucked it back into his pocket.

"I don't suppose," he said, "that you have any idea what this chap Rambaldi looks like?"

She shook her head. "There were no portraits of him."

"Well, if he's the guest of honour, he oughtn't to be too difficult to spot," the Doctor said.

Sydney wasn't so sure about that. As they followed the stream of guests along a wide hallway towards what she guessed must be the ballroom, it seemed to Sydney that there were people everywhere she looked. She saw guests stopping to greet each other and admire each others' gowns and jewellery, servants rushing here and there with silver platters of sweetmeats and fancies, and entertainers -- jugglers and dancers and what looked to Sydney like an entire _commedia dell'arte_ troupe, who had taken over the space next to the grand staircase to put on their show. She tugged the Doctor's arm, and they stopped next to a marble statue of a toga-wearing Roman nobleman.

"I think we should split up. You look in the ballroom, I'll take the rest of the ground floor, and we'll meet back here, next to the statue." She looked at him. "Or is that much planning going to stifle your improvisational flair?"

"You're a very impertinent young lady," the Doctor said. Sydney waited. "Very well. Back here, at the statue."

He left, his opera cape swirling behind him. Sydney watched him until he disappeared into the throng, then headed in the opposite direction.

Now that she was alone and had a defined goal, she felt calmer and more focused than she had since that first, wrenching moment when she'd been faced with the reality of having travelled back in time. It wasn't hard to pretend that she was at a fancy-dress party back in her own century -- some kind of grand Renaissance-themed charity ball, maybe -- on a simple find-and-tag mission. She could put aside, for a little while, the bigger question of how she was going to get home, and concentrate on the short term objective. As so often in her life, Sydney found her biggest problems were not ones she had easy, or even any, answers to. The only way to survive without going crazy was to concentrate on the here and now.

Even if the here and now happened to be the year 1496.

Sydney worked her way methodically through the crowds, pausing occasionally to eavesdrop on the conversations of the groups of guests she passed. It wasn't long, however, before she began to feel disheartened. Almost all the talk revolved around Vatican politics -- who was in favour and who was out -- and Sydney heard nothing that gave her any useful information about Rambaldi. If he was the guest of honour, he was certainly keeping a low profile.

Eventually she came to the far end of the mansion, where a set of double doors opened on to a magnificent garden. Like the house's interior, the garden was lit by hundreds of lamps, strung between the branches of trees. There were a few people in the garden, but not many -- it was late enough in the year that there was a chill in the night air. Better to be thorough, though. Sydney went through the doors and out into the garden.

The garden was laid out in a pattern of lawns and flower-beds which encouraged the casual stroller to follow a particular route. Sydney walked along a straight path which led to the western edge of the garden, then turned sharply so that she was walking east, although still on a path which slanted away from the mansion. At the garden's north boundary, the straight path met with a curved avenue which led back to the mansion in both directions.

The curved avenue was a circle, she realised. The straight path must therefore have the shape of an angled bracket -- she had walked to its apex and back again. And if the garden was symmetrical, there had to be another angled path on its eastern side.

The garden was laid out in the shape of the Eye of Rambaldi.

In the centre of the circular avenue, between where Sydney stood and the lights and music of the mansion, there was a fountain. A small stone bench had been placed next to it, and in the soft light from the many lanterns hanging in the trees, Sydney could see a shadowy figure sitting on it. Her breath caught in her throat.

It felt strange, now, that she'd wondered how she would recognise Rambaldi when she saw him. Now the moment was here, she simply knew.

She left the circular avenue and took the most direct to the fountain, walking across the grass. When she reached the little stone bench, she sat down at the opposite end to the man who was already sitting there. He was sitting hunched over a book which was open in his lap, writing furiously in it, and he didn't notice straight away that he wasn't alone any more.

To attract his attention, Sydney cleared her throat and said, "May I join you, Signor Rambaldi?"

He looked up, his expression mildly startled. After all the mysteries he'd inflicted on future generations, Sydney felt a measure of satisfaction of being able to surprise him, if only in this very minor way. He was a small man -- even sitting down, she was pretty sure he was a head shorter than she was -- and his face was plain, with features which weren't unattractive taken in isolation, but which somehow failed to mesh together into anything which might be considered handsome.

"I must appear ungrateful," he said. "So many have gathered to honour me, and yet I spurn their society."

"I don't blame you for wanting to step outside for some air -- it's pretty crowded in there. And the garden is beautiful." She glanced sideways at him. "You designed it, didn't you?"

He beamed. "Why, yes! The symmetry is pleasing, is it not?" He looked back in the direction of the house, and his expression became suddenly weary. "This house and its gardens are of my design, and the archdeacon who commissioned the work is so pleased that he has invited half of Rome here to celebrate my achievements. Yet the only reward I seek is to continue my work. All these people, with their endless chatter… it falls on my ears like some tongue I do not speak and cannot learn."

Interesting, Sydney thought. Was Rambaldi a savant, a technical genius with no ability to understand human interactions? It would explain why his inventions were brilliant but also wilfully cryptic.

It was then that she noticed he was looking at her in a very strange, intense way. "I know you," he said.

"I don't think so," Sydney said, then stopped, her eye falling on the open book Rambaldi had been writing in. Line upon line of tight writing curled around an image she knew all too well. But the image she was used to seeing on yellowing paper was bright and fresh on the page in front of her, the ink barely dry.

It was page forty-seven -- the picture of herself.

"How --" she whispered.

"Signor Rambaldi!"

Sydney jerked around, and saw another man walking quickly towards them. He was slimly built, with a beard which gave his face a pointed shape. There were flecks of grey in the beard and at his temples, and he moved lightly and with a grace which was almost cat-like.

There was nothing obviously threatening about the newcomer, but Rambaldi reacted immediately, his whole aspect becoming tense. Was this man a threat, Sydney wondered? Rambaldi's antipathy for social interaction ran so deep that this might be how he responded to everyone who said hello to him.

"Signor Rambaldi," the newcomer said again, ignoring Sydney completely. "How fortunate to come upon you here."

"Somehow I doubt that it is merely luck which brings you to me, my lord."

The bearded man smiled. There was something about the expression that Sydney found unsettling. "Perhaps not," he conceded. "I thought that, now you've had time to reflect, you might have reached a decision in regard to my little proposal."

"I made my decision when you first came to me. If I was insufficiently clear in expressing it, then I can only offer apologies for giving you cause to hope falsely." Rambaldi's voice was level, but Sydney could hear the note of fear in it. This was more than social anxiety, she realised: he was terrified.

"You are too possessive of your genius," the bearded man said, "especially considering it isn't really your genius at all."

All the colour drained from Rambaldi's face. His voice a whisper, he said, "It is not possible. You could not know --"

"Oh, I know," the bearded man said. "I know a great deal, Signor Rambaldi." There was no mistaking the threat in his voice.

There was a rustling sound, and two more men stepped out from the shadows behind the nearby trees. Apparently it didn't matter what century you were in -- when you needed to intimidate someone, you employed a couple of the local heavies. The two thugs moved to either side of the bench, securing Rambaldi by taking hold of his shoulders and forcing him to remain seated. But, just as the bearded man had, they paid no attention at all to Sydney.

That meant she had a chance, she realised. The idea that a woman could pose any kind of physical threat was clearly so far outside the way these men thought that it was inconceivable to them -- when she made her move, it would be literally the last thing they expected.

But she needed an opening.

The bearded man stepped closer to Rambaldi, reaching inside his cloak as he did so. When Sydney could see his hand again, he was holding something which looked like a hypodermic syringe.

_A syringe? In the fifteenth century?_ She stared at the bearded man.

"What is that?" Rambaldi asked. His voice was shaking.

The bearded man smiled. "Use your genius, Signor Rambaldi. I'm sure it will tell you."

Rambaldi blinked, and his face took on a strange, clouded expression. "It is a device for piercing the skin and extracting fluid from the body."

"Very good," the bearded man said. "Although you omitted its other use -- to force substances _into_ the body."

He leaned forward. Rambaldi struggled, but the two thugs held him firm. No one was looking at Sydney.

_Now._

She leapt up from the stone bench and took out the first of the two thugs with a punch to the side of his head which knocked him unconscious immediately. The other man watched him fall senseless to the ground, then stared at Sydney with a look of slack-jawed astonishment which, in other circumstances, would have been funny.

"Sorry to challenge your worldview," Sydney said, and slugged him.

The blow didn't land as cleanly as the first had. The man staggered back a pace, but quickly recovered his balance. Now that she'd lost the initial advantage of surprise, Sydney realised the fight was going to get a lot tougher, especially since leaps and kicks were virtually impossible in the heavy-skirted gown she wore. She needed a weapon.

She looked around and spotted one -- a small statue of a cherub decorating the base of the fountain. She grabbed it off its pedestal and swung it with all her strength at her opponent. It hit him square in the ribs and he fell back, into the fountain, with a loud splash. Sydney waded in after him. In the periphery of her vision, she was dimly aware that the commotion they were causing was drawing the attention of some of the guests standing near the mansion's doors, but there wasn't much she could do about that now.

The thug sat up in the shallow water and reached out to grab her -- Sydney jumped back, but he caught a corner of her wet dress and pulled her down. Now they were both in the water, tumbling to and fro as they each tried to force the other under. Her opponent outmatched her in strength and weight, and as her dress soaked up water, Sydney found her movements slowing.

Her adversary didn't waste time in pressing home his advantage, and Sydney found herself being forced under the water for longer and longer intervals. Although the fountain was barely more than a few feet deep, she was horribly aware that it was more than deep enough to drown in. And right now it looked as if she might.

She slipped out from under the thug's grip and managed to break the surface and take one last gasping breath before he forced her back down for the final time. Sydney struggled, grimly conscious of the fact that every second she was using up the little oxygen remaining in her lungs. Her chest was bursting -- in a couple more seconds, physical compulsion would override conscious control and she'd have to breath in water, and then it would be all over.

Without warning, the pressure pinning her underneath the water suddenly went away. Sydney lifted her head and took huge, rasping gulps of air. For a minute or more it was all she could do to lie in the fountain, looking up at the starry sky above and just breathing.

When she was able to sit up, she saw several things at once. The man who had nearly drowned her was lying on the ground next to fountain. He wasn't moving, although Sydney could see his chest rising and falling. Rambaldi was slumped across the stone bench, the bearded man positioned in front of him. Another figure completed the tableau -- the Doctor was standing over the unconscious thug.

"Be careful," the Doctor said as Sydney got to her feet and clambered out of the fountain: "He's armed."

He was talking about the bearded man. The syringe had vanished, and he was now holding something that was shaped like a gun, but was no make or model Sydney had ever seen. The bearded man smiled. "It's fortunate for me that I don't share your antipathy for weapons, isn't it, Doctor?"

Sydney looked at the Doctor. "You two know each other?"

The Doctor's lip wrinkled in displeasure. "Unfortunately, yes."

"What, no introduction? How rude!" The bearded man made a mock bow to Sydney. "I am the Master. It's always a pleasure to meet another of the Doctor's little girls."

"I am no one's little girl. My _name_ is Sydney Bristow." Ordinarily, giving her real full name to an enemy in the field would have been the last thing she would have done. In fifteenth century Italy, though, it wasn't as if she had any cover to be blown. And, anyway, the fight had pretty much ruined her chances of passing herself off as a Renaissance noblewoman.

On the stone bench, Rambaldi shuddered and let out a low cry of pain. The Doctor stepped forward to help him, but had to stop when the Master waved the gun threateningly. "What have you done to him?"

"Oh, I think I'll let you work that out yourself," the Master said. He took a step back. "Well, this little interlude has been a pleasure, but I must be going. I admit, my plan had been to take Signor Rambaldi with me, but since you've put my men temporarily out of action, I'm going to let you bring him to me yourselves."

"I really don't think we're going to do that," Sydney said.

The Master smiled strangely at her. "You might be surprised what you'll do, Sydney Bristow."

He turned and vanished into the shadows. Sydney moved to follow him.

"Don't," the Doctor said, placing a hand on her arm. "That was a disintegrator he was carrying. He would have used it on us here, if there hadn't been a chance of being seen from the house. If you face him alone and unarmed, he won't hesitate to kill you." He looked uncomfortable. "I have to apologise for the company I keep."

Sydney thought of Arvin Sloane. "It's okay. I know some pretty unsavoury people too." She looked down at the still form of the man who'd tried to drown her. "How did you -- No, wait, don't tell me. Venusian karate."

"Very handy," the Doctor said. "You should take classes."

"How'd you find us?"

"I wasn't having any luck in the ballroom, so I left. I heard the commotion out here and suspected you might be involved." He started to manoeuvre Rambaldi on to his back, and Sydney went over to help him. Rambaldi wasn't unconscious -- his eyes were open and his lips moving -- but his skin was deathly pale and his expression was pulled tight with pain. "What happened before I arrived?"

"I didn't see it, but I'm pretty sure the Master injected him with something -- he had a syringe. And, Doctor, Rambaldi was scared of him. The Master knew something, and whatever it was, it terrified Rambaldi."

The Doctor looked up sharply at that. "What did the Master say? Precisely?"

"That Rambaldi's genius wasn't his own." She studied the Doctor's pensive expression. "Do you know what he meant?"

"Perhaps…" On the bench, Rambaldi let out a groan. "We must get him to the TARDIS."

Rambaldi's lips moved, and it was clear he was trying to speak. Sydney and the Doctor both leaned closer to him; it was barely possible to make out the breathy whisper of what he said. "Home… Please… home."

"It's okay," Sydney said reassuringly. "We're going to take you somewhere so we can help you."

But that only made him more agitated. "No! No, you must… you must take me to my home. Please, I beg you…"

He gasped in pain, and at that moment something bizarre began to happen: Rambaldi's face and hands began to glow.

At first Sydney thought it was a trick of the moonlight, but as the strange luminescence became brighter, she realised that the weird glow was coming from within Rambaldi's body. She could see the individual veins and capillaries under his skin, shining threads woven into his flesh. She'd never seen anything like it before.

The Doctor, however, didn't seem astonished at all. Instead, he was nodding to himself. "Well, this explains a lot," he said, as if glowing people featured regularly in his life. He pulled Rambaldi into a sitting position. "Come on, help me get him up. It's time the guest of honour went home."

Sydney took hold of Rambaldi's other side helped the Doctor haul him to his feet. Confused, she asked, "So we're not taking him to the TARDIS after all?"

"No -- if what's happened to him is what I think it is, there's nothing there that could help him."

Rambaldi made a low noise of pain, and the threads of light in his face and hands glowed even more brightly. He looked, she thought, weirdly like a saint in a Renaissance painting, with his own halo. "What kind of poison is this?"

"It's a harmonic de-stabiliser," the Doctor said. "Harmless to humans, but extremely toxic to certain energy-based life-forms."

Sydney was concentrating on trying to keep Rambaldi on his feet, and so it took a moment for her to process what the Doctor had said. When she did, she nearly dropped the semi-conscious man on to the mansion's lawn. "Wait, wait, wait! Rambaldi is an _alien?"_

"No, Signor Rambaldi is host to an alien." The Doctor's expression was grave as he went on, "And it's very possible that both of them are going to die."

  


**FOUR**

Getting Rambaldi back to his home turned out to be more straightforward than Sydney had thought it would be. The hardest part was helping the semi-conscious, glowing man through the gardens of the mansion without attracting attention -- in the end the Doctor had thrown his cape over Rambaldi's head to hide him from view, forcing Sydney to concede that maybe it did have some practical value after all.

But once they'd reached the stables and found Rambaldi's carriage, everything became suddenly much easier. Horses, it turned out, came equipped with the equine equivalent of sat nav -- as soon as Sydney took hold of their reins, they trotted off smartly down the quiet streets and didn't stop until they arrived at the front door of a respectable but hardly grand residence.

While the Doctor manoeuvred Rambaldi from the carriage to the door, Sydney scouted ahead to make sure there were no nasty surprises waiting for them. Given the Master's interest in Rambaldi, she had to assume he already knew details such as where he lived, and she almost expected to walk into a trap. Finding the house completely empty didn't do anything to reassure her: instead, it only gave Sydney the unsettling feeling that they were doing exactly what the Master wanted them to.

Once they were safely inside, the Doctor helped Rambaldi on to a low _chaise longue_. "Where are the servants?" he asked.

"There are none," Rambaldi said with difficulty. If anything the strange glowing effect had become even more pronounced -- the light was moving beneath his skin, and the rippling effect made it look as if he were underwater. It was as if the light was a living thing, writhing in pain inside Rambaldi. No, not 'as if' -- given what the Doctor had said, it was alive. Sydney wasn't sure she was ready to deal with that idea just yet.

But it did explain the lack of domestic help. "You have to live alone. You can't risk anyone seeing you like this."

"It happens... only rarely. This is different... wrong..."

"You've been poisoned," the Doctor said. He kneeled down next to the couch and put his hand on Rambaldi's shoulder, forcing the other man to look at him. "Listen to me -- both of you. The poison is creating dissonance in the energy harmonics of this body, which is causing you intense pain. The pain is forcing you to draw off more energy, which is in turn causing even more dissonance. It's a feedback loop, and the only way to minimise the effects is to separate yourselves. Can you do that?"

Rambaldi's eyes went wide with alarm. "No! No, I cannot. I will die."

"You'll both die if you don't," the Doctor said.

Rambaldi closed his eyes. The light within his body pulsed rapidly, and Sydney realised that the human and alien were doing -- well, whatever it was they did to communicate with each other.

"Not a full separation... we would not survive. But perhaps... a partial decoupling..." He pointed at a simple wooden door set into the far side of the room. "My workshop..."

Taking this as her cue, Sydney once again helped the Doctor to move Rambaldi, this time from the couch to the wooden door. The door was locked; with difficulty, Rambaldi reached a hand into his cloak and produced a small, gold key. Sydney unlocked the door and, opening it, saw only inky darkness beyond. "We're going to need candles."

"No need," Rambaldi said. With the Doctor's help, he walked into the dark room. As he passed through the doorway, he put out his hand to touch the wall, in what Sydney took at first for the action of a sick man steadying himself. But as soon as his fingers made contact with the doorpost, she realised that wasn't it at all. Because it was at that moment that the room lit up.

"Touch activated electric light?" the Doctor said. "My dear fellow, we're going to have to have a serious talk about anachronisms."

Sydney blinked at the sudden brightness -- she hadn't been in the fifteenth century for long, but already she'd become accustomed to the universal dimness of a world without electricity. After a few seconds, though, her eyes adjusted to the new levels of illumination, and then she saw everything.

She was standing in Milo Rambaldi's workshop, surrounded by his designs, his inventions, his works. As if the room was his mind, Sydney thought, and she was right inside it.

There were parchments and papers lying on every surface, each one densely covered in writing and drawings. Rambaldi's projects and machines occupied every inch of available floorspace, so that the room, although large, felt cramped. Most of the creations Sydney saw were completely unknown to her, but it was jolting to see, here and there, objects she recognised. A tiny prototype Mueller Sphere sat at the end of a bench, the miniature globe spinning suspended on its invisible axis.

In fact, there was so much to take in that Sydney felt she could be forgiven for not noticing the alien object right away.

Everything else in the workshop, no matter how bizarre in design or mysterious in purpose, was made out of the types of material available in Renaissance Italy -- wood, iron, copper. But in the corner of the room there was something entirely foreign to this place and time. It looked like a giant, irregularly cut diamond, with jagged protrusions sticking out from it at every angle. Much of its surface was pitted and black, but in the undamaged patches Sydney could see that the object beneath seemed to be solid, and that delicate white filaments ran all the way through it, like the roots of a plant. "What is that?" she asked.

"My ship," Rambaldi said. "Help me."

Together, Sydney and the Doctor moved him across the workshop to the alien thing -- _ship?_ \-- in the corner. Once there, he placed his hands flat against an undamaged portion of its surface, and the pulsating light inside him immediately slowed and steadied. As Sydney watched the light dimmed and, at precisely the same time, the tiny filaments inside the crystal began to glow. Rambaldi visibly relaxed, and the lines of pain on his face gradually smoothed out.

"Partial separation," the Doctor said. His voice was quiet, as if he didn't want to distract Rambaldi. "I doubt they can completely de-merge, but the alien is minimising the poison's effects by drawing most of its energy from its ship rather than its host."

Sydney's head was spinning. She barely knew where to begin asking questions. She made herself take a deep, steadying breath, and started with something simple. "That crystal thing… that's really a spaceship? It doesn't look like one."

"My kind do not have physical forms, as you do," Rambaldi said. There was something about his voice -- a certain timbre, maybe -- that made him sound different to the nervous, shy man Sydney had first spoken to at the fountain. "We have no need to take supplies of air or water or food when we travel. All we require is a vehicle to maintain our waveform integrity."

The Doctor asked, "Who are you?"

"My name is Ramos. I was part of the Great Exploration, but my ship was damaged by a solar flare and I crashed here. My kind are not planet-dwellers, and I began to lose cohesion in this world's magnetic field. I would have died if not for this human's great mercy."

"Milo Rambaldi," the Doctor said, "is this true?"

A small smile appeared on Rambaldi's lips. "I saw a star fall to earth, and when I followed its trail, I found Ramos. He lives in the space between my thoughts. In return, he gifts me with knowledge."

"Knowledge far in advance of what this species should have at this point in its history," the Doctor said. He swept an arm out, taking in the workshop with its treasure trove of alien-inspired creations. "Ramos, you're introducing dangerous instability into their development."

"I am preserving knowledge," Ramos insisted. "The materials required to repair my ship do not exist here. I can never leave, and my host's life sustains us both now -- we will die together." With unmistakeable regret, he added, "I saw the birth of this galaxy; I should have seen its end."

"Ramos, I am sorry," the Doctor said, and Sydney heard real compassion in his voice.

"It is no matter," Ramos said. "We have no form. We are but the sum of our knowledge. It is knowledge which must survive. That is our purpose."

He spoke formally, and Sydney had the impression he was quoting something which had the significance of a religious text. "You're letting Rambaldi record what you know so it isn't lost."

Ramos nodded, and the filaments inside the crystal glowed brighter. "Yes. The knowledge is my gift to your people."

"But you're not helping us," Sydney said. "The Path brought me here from the future. Even five hundred years from now, your gifts are still too advanced for us to use wisely."

Ramos said, "I know."

Sydney stared. "How can you know?"

"Many energy beings have a sensitivity to the probability spectrum of the time stream," the Doctor said. "They can't see the future, exactly, but they're often able to sense aspects of it with a fair degree of accuracy."

So that was where Rambaldi's prophecies came from. Still looking at Rambaldi-Ramos, Sydney said, "If you know, why are you still doing this?"

"Because knowledge is neither good nor evil. I choose to give the gift. You must choose how to use it."

Sydney shook her head. "No. No, Ramos, you don't get it. We're not all like Milo Rambaldi, wanting knowledge for its own sake. Most of us are lazy and greedy and your gifts just corrupt us more. Where I come from, there are people who've formed cults devoted to you. People who are so obsessed with possessing your work that they'll do anything -- _anything_ \-- to get it. People who care more about the power your gifts can give them than they do about their own families."

Her voice had steadily risen as she'd been speaking, and Sydney realised that she was almost shouting. She wasn't even seeing Rambaldi or the Doctor or the workshop around her any more, not really. Instead she was seeing Sloane, Danny, her mother, her father -- all of them victims, in one way or another, of an obsession with Rambaldi, whether it was their own or someone else's.

Abruptly, she felt the anger leave her. What was the point of anger, when nothing could be changed? Ramos knew the consequences of what he was doing, but would do it anyway, and the future would re-shape itself accordingly -- in fact, it already had re-shaped itself, because she was a product of that future.

"I told someone -- I will tell someone -- that I believe in choices," she said at last. "But there are no choices, are there? It's like everything's already happened, even before it has."

She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the Doctor's. "I think we should leave Signor Rambaldi and Ramos alone for a while," he said gently.

Sydney allowed him to guide her out of the workshop and back to the sitting room. Once there, she sat down on the _chaise longue_ while the Doctor lit a small fire in the grate and then briefly disappeared to find the pantry. Her dress was still damp from the soaking she'd received in the fountain, and it felt good to warm herself in front of the cheerful flames. When the Doctor reappeared, he was carrying a plate piled high with bread, cured meats and fruit, as well as two goblets and a bottle of wine.

"I don't recommend drinking too much of the water in this century," he said by way of explanation as he filled the two goblets. "Anyway, this was a very good year."

The wine warmed her inside at the same time as the fire was warming her outside. Sydney helped herself to the food; it was only when she started to eat she realised how hungry she was.

The Doctor broke the silence. "Don't be too hard on Ramos. From his perspective, he's doing the right thing. And it seems that Rambaldi feels the same. The similarities between them were probably what allowed Ramos to bond so strongly with him."

Sydney looked at him. "Whatever happened to 'Rambaldi is changing the course of human history and must be stopped'?"

"Well, yes, there is that." The Doctor had the good grace to look abashed. "But Ramos isn't evil."

"That doesn't make a difference. I've met lots of people who weren't evil. You'd be amazed how many arms dealers are good to their moms."

He smiled, but Sydney saw more sadness in it than humour. "Someone as young as you shouldn't have such a cynical view of human nature."

"And someone as old as you shouldn't have any reason to be so sentimental about it," Sydney shot back.

At that, he chuckled. "Oh, you think I'm old, do you? I'll have you know that where I come from I'm quite the young buck."

_Where I come from._ And where was that, Sydney wondered, that time machines and opera capes were in equally plentiful supply? But she'd already dealt with far more than her daily quota of strangeness, and that was one question she didn't want to come out and ask him directly -- if only because she was a little bit afraid he'd actually answer it. "I guess you're going to tell me that in the future evolution gets rid of all our flaws and failings, and everyone's perfect and good and it's just like _Star Trek."_

"Oh, heavens, no. How dull would that be? You've come five centuries back in time and seen for yourself that humanity runs the spectrum from the Master's hired thugs all the way to Milo Rambaldi. If you'd travelled five centuries into your future you would have found the same thing -- and five centuries after that, and after that, and as far as you could go. There is a fire in the human spirit which never, ever dims. A fire which lets you face the unknown and embrace it, just as Rambaldi did. Just as you have." He smiled at her, the flickering light from the fire lending his features an extra warmth. In spite of his protestations of youth, he looked, she thought, like someone's ideal father, kindly and approving. No sooner had the thought formed than she found herself thinking of her own father, so very distant from her in every conceivable sense of the word. Yet she missed him so much it actually hurt.

She took a fortifying gulp of wine and said, "Those people I was talking about back there -- the ones who care more about power than their families… My mother's one of them. She betrayed my father and me for… well, for a lot of reasons, but Rambaldi was one of the biggest ones. And the man I was going to marry was murdered by someone else who's obsessed with the knowledge Ramos is handing out like candy on Hallowe'en."

"I am sorry," the Doctor said.

"I deal," Sydney said, more harshly than she meant to. "The point is: Rambaldi is like some huge fault line running right through my life. Every so often there's a quake and people die, and the rest of the time I can never relax because I know it's there and nothing's ever really safe, really secure." While she'd been talking, Sydney had been looking down into her goblet of wine, swirling the liquid into a dark vortex that drew her gaze down and down. Now she stopped and looked up, meeting the Doctor's gaze directly, challenging him. "I know what people are like, Doctor. I've seen what they do. Our flaws aren't charming little quirks, they're destructive. What Ramos is doing is about as responsible as handing a nuclear detonator to a toddler, and if you and Rambaldi think differently, well, I don't know which one of you is more naïve."

"Sydney --"

She held up her hand. "Be quiet."

He looked annoyed. "If we can't even have a civilised disagreement --"

"No," Sydney said, "I heard something."

There it was again -- a faint rapping at the front door of Rambaldi's house. Sydney looked at the Doctor. "The Master?"

"Knocking politely isn't really his style."

Sydney put down the goblet and plate she was holding and stood up. "Well, it can't be FedEx. Better see who it is."

The Doctor also rose. "We'll both go."

She could see there was no point in arguing with him, so they went together to the door, where the Doctor made ready to open it and Sydney positioned herself just out of view. He looked at her, and she nodded. The Doctor tensed, and opened the door wide.

The small boy standing on the step looked up nervously.

"Well, now," the Doctor said. "Hello there."

"Letter for you, sir," the boy said, holding out an envelope. The Doctor took it, turned it over once in his hands, and passed it to Sydney. It was sealed with a blob of red wax, and was addressed, in elegantly curling script, to _The Doctor and Miss Bristow, care of Signor Milo Rambaldi. _

The boy was still hovering on the step. "Please, sir. The man who gave me the letter -- he said you'd pay me."

The Doctor sighed. "Of course he did." He dug around in his pockets and pulled out a handful of assorted -- _very_ assorted -- loose change. He examined it for a moment before selecting a gold coin and dropping into the grubby, outstretched palm. "Here you are. Don't spend it all at once!" he called as the boy sped away.

"So, not only is the Master evil," Sydney said as he closed the door, "he's a bad tipper as well."

"It's so often the case."

Francie would have something to say about that, Sydney thought. She unfolded the letter, breaking the wax seal, and held it up to the nearest candle to read:

 

_My dear Doctor, my dearest Miss Bristow, _

By now you will have realised that your solution to Signor Rambaldi's malaise is merely a temporary mitigation and nothing more. The harmonic de-stabiliser with which I injected him was tailored to his DNA and cannot be neutralised without the unique key on which it was based. I need hardly add that only I possess the key, and that unless you are willing to spend the rest of this universe's lifespan attempting to replicate it, your choice is simple: You can allow both Signor Rambaldi and his guest to suffer an excruciating, unremitting agony which will slowly kill them both, or you can bring him to me at the Colosseum before dawn.

I leave the decision entirely to you.

I am, yours, etc.

The Master

 

She finished reading and looked at the Doctor. "He really goes in for moustache-twirling villainy, doesn't he?"

"He's always been overly melodramatic," the Doctor sighed, flipping his opera cape over his shoulder.

Sydney opened her mouth to reply to that but thought better of it. Then she noticed the Doctor moving to open the door again. She stepped in front of him. "Where are you going?"

"To meet the Master, of course."

"What's your plan?"

"Oh, I'll think of something."

He was smiling broadly, and Sydney suddenly thought about how jauntily he'd walked right up to the mansion's entrance -- she was sure he hadn't remembered about the psychic paper until the very last moment. He was enjoying himself, she realised. Whatever his punishment had been for the unspecified rules he'd broken, being sent to Renaissance Italy was a welcome reprieve for him, and he was relishing it.

Accusingly, she said, "I'm stuck in the past, history is getting royally screwed, and you're not taking any of it seriously. This is all just an adventure to you, isn't it?"

The Doctor blinked, clearly taken aback. "Well, of course it's an adventure. But just an adventure? No, not that. Never that."

She held up the letter. "Is the Master telling the truth?"

"About the cure? Yes. Even if I used the TARDIS's laboratories to sequence Rambaldi's DNA, I'd still have no way of knowing what harmonic frequency the Master applied to distort it. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, if the needle were a single grain of sand and the haystack were the Andromeda galaxy."

"So we really don't have a choice."

The Doctor looked at her sternly. "There is always a choice. Always."

"Then maybe you'd like to elaborate, because I'm not seeing the possibilities."

"Sydney." For the first time, there was a note of exasperation in the Doctor's voice. "You are walking about in fifteenth century Italy and you've just met your first alien and you don't see the possibilities? Look around you! The universe is awash with them!"

Sydney started to answer him, then stopped when she realised that the words forming on her lips were _I don't._ What was she going to say next? _I don't believe that,_ maybe? But she did. She had. She wanted to.

She remembered, suddenly, how she'd felt when she'd been recruited into SD-6, unquestioning in her belief that she was serving her country. She'd felt proud, daunted -- but also excited. Her secret life had been an adventure, and while she'd always known that the danger she faced was all too real, the rush of adrenaline that came with succeeding out in the field had been the most intense high she'd ever experienced. And then there'd been Danny's death, and finding out the truth about SD-6 and her father and her mother, and Rambaldi's prophecies squatting malignantly over all of it, and she'd lost something. And maybe that something was her sense of adventure -- the sense of freedom that came from the knowledge that nothing was predetermined; that everything could be changed.

And yet the first thing she'd done when she'd discovered the truth behind SD-6 was go to the CIA. If she hadn't believed that her actions could change something, she wouldn't have become a double agent, working from inside to try to bring down Sloane and his organisation. And if she didn't believe it any more, then she might as well stop trying altogether, and go back to being Sloane's willing pawn.

And Sydney wasn't going to do _that_ anytime soon.

"How do we cure Rambaldi?" she asked. "I've had a really long night, so please try to answer without using phrases like 'harmonic frequency'."

"To synthesize an antidote, I need to know the unique key the Master used to create the poison -- and the only place to get that is from his TARDIS," the Doctor said.

"Which is probably somewhere pretty close to the Master." Sydney paused, thinking that through. "Rambaldi's really sick. The fastest way for us to get the cure is to get inside the Master's time machine. Which means going to meet him."

"Precisely," the Doctor said, and started towards the door again. Again, Sydney stopped him.

"The Master's got better tech than us, better intel and, so far, a way better strategy. I'm not going up against him without a plan and some kind of tactical advantage."

The Doctor sighed. "Oh, dear. You're about to start drawing diagrams on a blackboard, aren't you? That's what the Brigadier always does at times like this. "

"The Master called me a little girl," Sydney said.

"Yes, and I appreciate that must have been a very hurtful thing to hear --"

"No," she interrupted him. "What I meant was -- he doesn't think I'm a threat. You're his adversary here, not me. We can use that."

The Doctor blinked, and she could see he was taking in that idea. Slowly, he nodded. "What kind of thing might you be proposing?"

"Well," Sydney said, "here's a few ideas to start with…"

  


**FIVE**

Although Sydney had never known two missions to be exactly the same, it was possible to make some generalisations about the common components of a 'typical' mission. There would be a carefully worked out strategy, for example, based on solid intel. There would also be a disguise, usually incorporating at least one example of Marshall's technological wizardry. And when Sydney stepped into the field, it was almost always in the certain knowledge that she could rely on her fellow agents -- Dixon, Vaughn, Weiss and the rest -- to back her up.

This was not a typical mission.

In fact, as she slipped into the Colosseum through one of its many open arches, Sydney couldn't help thinking this was just about the least typical mission she'd ever attempted. Her clothing -- the robe she'd borrowed from the dressing room in the Doctor's time machine -- couldn't so much be described as 'a disguise' as 'the only thing she had that didn't stick out a mile in the fifteenth century'. The most technologically advanced equipment she was carrying was the carving knife she'd taken from Milo Rambaldi's kitchen, and the closest thing she had to mission intel was a mocking letter from a man who seemed to think he was a comic-book villain, right down to the pointy beard. And, perhaps most unsettling of all, the only real ally she had in this century was a man about whom she had more questions the longer she spent in his company. The real enigma wasn't Milo Rambaldi, Sydney thought -- it was the Doctor.

Then she was inside the Colosseum, and the sight of it chased every other thought out of her head.

The Colosseum in 1496 was nothing like the tourist attraction Sydney knew from her own time. Then, back in the twenty-first century (was that even the right tense?) she'd taken the guided tour with Francie, and they'd ooo'ed and aaah'ed with the rest of the party as the guide had talked about the uniqueness and historical importance of the giant structure. But this place was completely different. Here, the Colosseum was a derelict shell, the lingering ruin of an empire whose fall had heralded an age of barbarity which was only just coming to an end. Wild flowers and grasses grew up from the sandy soil which covered the stadium floor, and the sides of the arena were tumbling down in places where the stone columns had been plundered for cheap building materials. It was utterly quiet, without even the twenty-first century's ever-present hum of traffic to break the silence. Sydney couldn't shake the weird feeling that she'd travelled in time again, although whether to the very distant past or the very distant future, she couldn't tell.

She heard a click from behind her, and the Master's voice said, "Hello again, Miss Bristow."

Sydney froze. Making sure her tone remained casual, she said, "I thought you'd be more pleased to see me, since you went to the trouble of issuing the invitation."

"Oh, I'm very pleased to see you," the Master said. "Although I'd be even more pleased to see the Doctor and Signor Rambaldi." He raised his voice. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

"You're wasting your breath," Sydney said.

"I think not," the Master said, and even though Sydney couldn't see his face, she could hear the note of sneering amusement in his voice. "If I know the Doctor -- and unfortunately I do -- he won't allow a young lady of his acquaintance to be menaced without stepping in to assist."

"I can look after myself."

"I know. The files on you provide ample evidence on that. I was actually quite impressed by some of your exploits. Especially what you did in Chad; you must tell me at some point how you accomplished that particular feat."

That unnerved Sydney far more than the knowledge he was holding a gun on her. Her status as an unknown quantity was almost the only card they had to play. The last thing she needed was for the Master to have done his research.

Keeping her voice cool, she said, "Check your sources. I've never been to Chad."

Suddenly, the Master was no longer behind her, but was standing in front of Sydney, pointing the weapon he held at her forehead instead of the back of her skull. Somehow he'd moved with almost preternatural speed and silence, and for the first time Sydney saw something truly menacing beneath the theatrical mannerisms. She found herself thinking of a cat, toying with a small bird for its own amusement before unsheathing its claws to finish off its prey.

"Not at this point in your timeline, perhaps. But you will." The Master smiled pleasantly. "You shouldn't have told me your name, Sydney Bristow. You can find out all kinds of things from a name. That's why the Doctor and myself guard ours with so much care. We're more alike than not, he and I."

The Master paused dramatically. When after a couple of seconds nothing had happened, he seemed disappointed that the Doctor hadn't taken up the obvious cue provided for his entrance.

At last the Master appeared to tire of waiting. Sydney tensed when she saw his hand tightened on the handle of the weapon he held. "Perhaps you never go to Chad after all."

The disintegrator started to emit a whine that rapidly rose in pitch. Sydney wondered if she had even the tiniest chance of throwing herself out of its range. It didn't seem as if she had any choice but to try.

"Wait!" The Doctor emerged from the shadows beneath one of the Colosseum's archways, supporting the stricken figure of Rambaldi. "Wait. Don't shoot her."

The Master relaxed his grip on the disintegrator, and the ominous whining sound faded away. "It's good to see you're as predictable as ever, Doctor. And Signor Rambaldi -- my, you don't look well at all. Whatever can the matter be?"

Rambaldi blinked at the Master through bloodshot eyes; Sydney could see the telltale patterns of light beneath his skin which signalled the presence of Ramos. Even the short journey from his home had taken a toll on him, and he was evidently in so much pain that he didn't even have the strength to speak. Nevertheless the depth of anger in his gaze communicated his feelings clearly. The Master only laughed and, gesturing with the gun, directed Sydney to join the Doctor and Rambaldi. "Walk," the Master ordered, and they began to make their way across the moonlit arena's floor.

Their progress was slow, limited by Rambaldi's painful steps, and Sydney used the extra time to try to figure out where the Master was taking them. Unfortunately she saw no clues around them: the Colosseum was deserted, and their path was leading towards one of the pillars supporting its outer wall. Except -- no, the pillar wasn't supporting anything. Now that Sydney looked more closely at it in the bright moonlight, she saw that the pillar stopped a few inches short of the tier above it. It wasn't part of the stadium's structure.

As they approached, two figures stepped out from the shadows. Sydney recognised them as the thugs she'd fought back at the mansion. Unfortunately, it looked like they recognised her as well. One was sporting a deep bruise on his jaw, and the other was holding one arm stiffly. They both regarded Sydney with deep hostility.

When they reached the column, the Master touched the engravings on its surface in a complex sequence. The pillar split open, revealing a brightly lit interior which bore more than a passing resemblance to the TARDIS.

Sydney glanced sideways at the Doctor. "_His_ time machine has a camouflage setting? You need to go back to the dealer."

"The chameleon function is overrated," the Doctor said, a touch defensively. "When you need to get back to your TARDIS in a hurry, the last thing you need is for it to have decided to change into something inconspicuous without telling you. Just try spending half an hour checking every oak tree in a forest while the sheriff's men shoot arrows at you and you'll understand what I mean."

The Master went in first, his fifteenth century henchmen falling in behind Sydney, Rambaldi and the Doctor. The interior of the Master's time machine was more than similar to the TARDIS; it was exactly the same, right down to the odd-looking decorative roundels on the walls. The only difference was the strange-looking device which had been set up in one corner of the console room; the technology looked completely unfamiliar to Sydney, but she could see that at the heart of the device was a large piece of crystal which was very similar to the one in Rambaldi's workshop.

Rambaldi recognised it, too: his ragged breathing broke into a gasp. "A ship..." he whispered, and Sydney heard the longing in his voice. No, in _Ramos'_ voice, she corrected herself -- the undamaged crystal hooked into the Master's machine must represent for him the first real opportunity to escape from Earth he'd had since arriving.

"A ship," the Master agreed pleasantly. "It's a shame, though, that in your current physical form it wouldn't be possible for you to use it."

Realisation hit Sydney. "That was the proposal you were talking about at the party. You offered Ramos escape, and he refused." She looked around at Rambaldi-Ramos. "Why?"

The answer came slowly, and with long pauses as Rambaldi-Ramos had to fight for breath. "Because... the trauma of separation... would surely end this body's life. I could not do that... to the one who had given... so much to me... no matter how much I desired it."

"A very _moral_ decision," said the Master. Sydney could hear the derision dripping from his words.

"And a very wise one," the Doctor put in, "since you never had any intention of letting Ramos take the ship and go on his way, did you? That was just a ruse -- what you really wanted was to trick him into separating from Rambaldi. Once he was back in his energy form you'd be able to trap him and keep him prisoner."

"So when you realised you couldn't tempt Ramos into doing what you wanted, you decided to force a separation by poisoning Rambaldi," Sydney finished. She narrowed her eyes. "But what do you want with Ramos?"

The Master shrugged. "Isn't it obvious? Knowledge is power, my dear, and Ramos has a lot of both."

"He also has a respect for life which you lack," the Doctor said. "I'd say that knocks your plans on the head somewhat."

"Where there's a will, Doctor," the Master returned. "You see, there is another way to separate Ramos and Signor Rambaldi. The harmonic de-stabiliser has disrupted Ramos' ability to draw energy from his host. If I offer him another source of energy, he will leave Rambaldi to get it."

"He won't do that," Sydney said.

"Won't he? He will. He knows it. Look at him."

Sydney looked at Rambaldi-Ramos, hoping to see defiance in his expression. Instead, however, what she found there was a mixture of horror and fear. She turned to the Doctor, hoping for reassurance.

The Master smiled. "I don't think she understands. Really, Doctor, you must try to find brighter assistants. Explain to her."

"Ramos needs energy the way you need oxygen, Sydney," the Doctor said. "If you were suffocating and someone offered you air, you couldn't choose not to breathe. The survival instinct is too strong."

"And I am going to offer Ramos a particularly irresistible source of energy. Something much more sustaining than the life-force of a mere human." The Master gestured with the gun: "Doctor, if you don't mind."

Sydney stared at him. She'd half-guessed the truth, but it was still a jolt to hear it confirmed out loud. "Don't tell me -- you're really a glowing ball of light too."

"No," the Doctor said. "However, I have… certain regenerative capabilities that humans don't." He addressed himself to the Master: "But I will not help you to do this."

"You have no choice," the Master said, and pointed the gun he held at Sydney.

Sydney stood perfectly still. Part of her attention was on the weapon being aimed on her -- it was hard not to focus to some degree on the muzzle of a gun which happened to be pointed at you -- but the greater part was on the Doctor. The plan had been hers, but its timing lay with him. She hadn't realised until now that the Doctor's chief weakness appeared to be that he was more concerned about other people's lives than his own. If he was delaying now out of fear that she was going to get vaporised, then Sydney might have to take matters into her own hands.

"There is always a choice," the Doctor said.

"Enough of your prattling," the Master said, sounding bored. He switched on the device.

An arc of something that looked like electricity crackled into existence between Rambaldi, the Doctor and the crystal embedded in the machine between them. The faces of both men twisted in agony. After a couple of seconds, Sydney saw a change in the energy-arc flowing between them: it had a direction, and was unmistakeably flowing out of Rambaldi and into the Doctor through the crystal.

The Master looked on, his attention absorbed by the spectacle. For the briefest of moments, he wasn't watching Sydney.

She launched herself at the control console of the of Master's TARDIS, at the same time allowing the Doctor's sonic screwdriver to drop down from inside the sleeve of her gown -- where she'd hidden it -- into her hand. At the console, she jammed the device into the first open socket she found, pushing it in so hard that there was a small fizz of sparks as it connected. She hoped she hadn't broken it, and felt reassured when its tiny lights started to flash in sequence.

Immediately, there was a strange wheezing, groaning sound and the thick rotor in the middle of the console lit up and began to rise and fall.

The Master wheeled on her. "What are you doing, you stupid child?"

"Hacking your time machine's main computer," Sydney said. "We figured if you wouldn't give us the cure for the poison you used on Rambaldi, we'd have to take it."

He pulled at the sonic screwdriver, but Sydney had rammed it into place with so much force that it was stuck. "The breach has triggered the emergency protocols. We're taking off with no destination. Do you know how dangerous that is?"

As if in confirmation, the floor shuddered under Sydney's feet, then lurched violently, like the deck of a small boat in heavy swell. The Master clutched at the side of the console to stop himself falling, dropping the gun as he did so. Sydney dived for it but wasn't fast enough, and the disintegrator skittered across the room, straight into the waiting hands of one of the two thugs. Sydney's heart stopped, and then started again as she realised with a wash of relief that the man didn't know what to do with the weapon. Of course he didn't -- he must never have seen anything like it.

"Shoot her!" the Master shouted at him. "Shoot her, you idiot!"

The thug hesitated, caught between his terror of the Master and his more general terror of the entire, bizarre situation. His fear of his boss won out, and he fumbled with the disintegrator, clumsily trying to mimic the way the Master had been holding it.

He did a pretty good job of imitating it, except for one crucial mistake. He held it back to front.

The look on his face as he vaporised himself was mainly one of surprise.

Sydney looked over at the Master. "You should consider running some training courses. Just a thought."

The Master ignored her, and turned to the remaining thug -- the one with the bruise of his jaw from the earlier fight. "You! Get her!"

Bruised Jaw was still staring at the spot where his colleague had been until a couple of seconds earlier, the expression on his face a mixture of shock and disbelief. Then, plainly deciding that the best way to channel his feelings was extreme aggression, he rushed at Sydney.

The control room lurched again. The Doctor and Rambaldi, strapped in to the crystal device, didn't fall, but the energy-arc changed again, and it looked to Sydney as if it had somehow reversed and was flowing in the opposite direction. The Doctor and Rambaldi slumped simultaneously, their bodies so lifeless that Sydney couldn't tell if they were dead or deeply unconscious. The Master remained upright, but only by grabbing the console's controls for support.

He must have pushed something he didn't mean to, because the control room doors swung open. The view through them was no longer the arena of the Colosseum bathed in moonlight. Beyond the doors lay a dizzying swirl of colours and almost-shapes; it made Sydney think of the patterns a droplet of oil made when it landed on water, except that it went on forever. She couldn't look at it for more than a second without starting to feel dizzy.

The room shook. Sydney lost her grip on the wall and slid helplessly across the room until she hit the far wall, followed by Bruised Jaw, who had also lost his balance. He grabbed Sydney's ankle, which stopped her sliding, but became a less desirable development when he tried to break her leg by twisting it round. Sydney kicked him, catching him by chance on the jaw again. He screamed in pain, and rolled away from her.

At that moment the floor tilted again. Sydney managed to grab on to the base of the control console, but Bruised Jaw wasn't so lucky. He tumbled towards the door, and then right out of it, vanishing into the chaos beyond without even a scream.

At the console, the Master had finally won his battle with the ship's controls. He pulled out the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and the pitching and rolling abruptly stopped. Sydney took the opportunity to get to her feet and quickly retrieve the disintegrator from where it had fallen.

She gripped the holster tightly and turned the weapon on the Master. The firing mechanism was a simple stud on the handle; it felt reassuringly comfortable under her thumb. "Guess what -- I know which way round to hold this."

The Master turned around and slowly raised his hands, still holding the sonic screwdriver. "Well, this is a minor inconvenience."

Sydney risked a glance in the direction of the Doctor and Rambaldi. The arcing electricity had stopped, but Sydney wasn't sure that was necessarily a good thing. Rambaldi's eyes were closed and his skin was sallow and the Doctor was in no better condition. For all Sydney knew, they could both already be dead.

The swirling vortex outside the open doors was weirdly hypnotic. Sydney tried not to look at it, but still felt her gaze being drawn towards it. "What is that? Where are we?"

"That is the vortex." The Master smiled. "It appears we've reached something of an impasse, doesn't it? I am in possession of both the cure and the knowledge required to land this ship. Vaporise me now and you'll lose both."

"Thanks," Sydney said, "but I feel a lot more comfortable _with_ the gun."

"As you wish," the Master said. "You are a remarkable young woman, Sydney Bristow."

Sydney raised an eyebrow. "Really? Because I thought I was just a stupid child."

"A momentary lapse. I meant what I said earlier. I really was impressed by what I found when I decided to do some background research. The CIA's files are very comprehensive, and much easier to decrypt than they'd like to think. Your interest in Signor Rambaldi is more than intellectual, isn't it?"

"What if it is?"

"We're on the same side, Sydney, you and me." The Master's voice was low, and had a quality which was as mesmerising, in its own way, as the swirling patterns outside. "I want to remove Ramos and his influence from the time-stream -- yes, for my own purposes, I don't deny that. But once he's gone, the future -- your future -- could be re-shaped to be what it should have been."

"No Rambaldi."

The Master nodded. "No Rambaldi. Imagine your life, unsullied by his influence."

"That's just a fantasy."

"No," the Master said. "It's the reality which existed before Ramos's arrival on Earth caused it to change."

Sydney blinked. It was hard to accept that Rambaldi and his inventions had somehow popped into existence, and that the world she lived in had abruptly rearranged itself to accommodate them. Arvin Sloane's obsession stretched back decades: was it possible that there had been some pristine version of his life uncorrupted by his malignant fixation? And if there had been, was it possible -- just possible -- that that version of Sloane hadn't decided it was necessary to have Danny killed? What life had she lost, Sydney wondered, suddenly overwritten by a history which had been bent and stretched out of shape to include Milo Rambaldi?

"We'd be changing history," she said.

"No -- we would be restoring history, returning it to its original course. We could even --" the Master lowered his voice, "-- we could even _improve_ it."

"Improve it," Sydney repeated. She thought about her parents, twisted up in decades of deceit, and tried to imagine the people they might have been instead. Didn't they deserve that? Didn't _she_ deserve it?

"Think about it. Ramos claims to be giving his knowledge to humanity to use as they will, but you and I know what they'll do with it. But you could make better decisions. Power like that shouldn't be scattered for any fool to uncover -- it should be wielded by people who are intelligent enough to know what to do with it. People like you and me."

There was something oddly familiar about the Master at that moment, and Sydney was distracted from the images in her mind of her rewritten, perfect life while she tried to pinpoint what it was. Suddenly another image popped into her head: Arvin Sloane, learning about Rambaldi for the first time, beginning to believe that power like that could be wielded successfully by someone strong enough, smart enough, _good_ enough. Someone like him.

Slowly, she said, "You know something? You remind me of my boss." Sydney narrowed her eyes. "I _really_ hate my boss."

She started to push her thumb down on the gun's firing stud.

Before she could complete the action, though, there was a bang and a shower of sparks as the energy-transference device exploded. Sydney spun around, just in time to see Rambaldi break free from his restraints and launch himself across the room. He was heading straight for the open door.

And the Master was standing directly in its path.

An expression of dumb surprise appeared on the Master's face, and before it had completely formed it changed again, to became a look of terror. His arm began to lift in a reflex action of defence and he started to move out of the way, but there was simply no time. Rambaldi collided with him and simply kept going, and the two men tumbled together through the open door and out into the void beyond.

Sydney stared out of the open doors, but there was no sign of either of them in the maelstrom. Both Rambaldi and the Master were gone.

"Sydney."

Sydney looked round. The Doctor's voice was barely a whisper, but he was awake and alive and Sydney felt relief wash through her. She put down the Master's gun and went over to help him out of the bonds which held him in the energy-transference device. "Are you all right?"

He rubbed at his wrists as she released his hands. "Yes, although that was one of the less pleasant experiences I've had recently."

Sydney found herself checking the Doctor's complexion for the telltale glow underneath his skin. "Is Ramos… in there with you?"

"No. I believe Ramos is where he wanted to be." Free of his bonds, the Doctor stood up, and although he swayed a little on his feet, he seemed to be recovering his strength by the second.

Sydney couldn't take her eyes off the still-open doors and the vortex beyond. "They just -- ran out. Is there anything we can --?"

"I'm sorry, there isn't." The Doctor touched her arm, gently drawing her attention away from the doors. "Best get those closed, I think. I do hate a draught, don't you?"

He pulled a small red lever next to a row of green buttons and the doors swung shut. At once Sydney felt more secure, although rationally she knew they were still floating about in a sea of interstitial nothingness. "Can you land this thing?"

"I can do better than that -- we'll set the co-ordinates for the early twenty-first century and get you home. How does that sound?"

It sounded like the best idea Sydney had ever heard, period. "Yes," she said fervently, "please."

The Doctor smiled. "Very well. Now, let's hope the Master hasn't made too many changes to the basic control paths. I don't think either of us is in the appropriate frame of mind for a visit to the Pleistocene."

  


**SIX**

To Sydney's immense relief, when the doors of the Master's TARDIS opened they didn't reveal dinosaurs wading through fetid swamps, but a small side-street in the heart of modern-day Rome. The Doctor checked a series of impenetrable read-outs, and announced that they'd arrived a little more than eight hours before Sydney -- the earlier version -- was due to break into the vault beneath the Vatican and activate the Path. All Sydney -- the current version -- had to do was lay low for the rest of the day, and then pick up the mission exactly at the point where she'd left off.

In the meantime, as far as the rest of the world knew, she was on a plane high above the Atlantic. For the next several hours there were going to be two Sydney Bristows in existence. Which meant that one of them could have the day off.

That was how Sydney had come to be sitting with the Doctor at a shady table at a small street café, waiting for the drinks they'd ordered to arrive. The café was close to the Colosseum, and Sydney's view of it also included the hordes of tourists milling around its arches and the dozens of refreshment carts which had been set up in its vicinity. Every few seconds, someone sped by on a Vespa scooter, and every other pedestrian was talking animatedly into a cell phone. Sydney couldn't believe how amazingly, wonderfully _normal_ it all was. Even the tang of motor exhaust fumes in the air was welcome.

On the other side of the street there was a small trattoria, nestled between a dry-cleaner's and a souvenir shop. It looked perfectly innocuous, except for the fact that every table in the restaurant was empty. As Sydney watched a couple of tourists peered in through the window and, failing to see any signs of food-related activity, walked on. "What are you going to do with the Master's TARDIS now he's dead?" she asked.

A waiter arrived and served the Doctor a small espresso and Sydney a large and frothy cappuccino. Once he'd left, the Doctor sipped his coffee thoughtfully and said, "I wouldn't be so sure that he is."

Sydney stirred her drink, causing the chocolate dusting on top to bend into a pleasing pattern of swirls. "He fell into the vortex. How could he survive that?"

"There are ways," the Doctor said vaguely. "I imagine he'll turn up again. He always does."

"But you have his time machine now -- and it can go anywhere, right? I guess that means you can start travelling again."

At that, the Doctor looked scandalised. "And abandon my TARDIS? Don't even suggest it! She'd be furious with me." He put down his coffee cup. "Besides, a TARDIS tends to absorb something of the personalities of the people who travel in it. I'm not going to spend more time in the Master's TARDIS than is absolutely necessary."

"So what will you do with it?"

"I'll take it back to the Renaissance and leave it parked somewhere out of the way, and let the people who sent me there know where it is. They'll take care of it. And then," he concluded, "I'll have to go back myself."

"Back to your… planet?" Sydney asked and, God, that sounded weird.

"No, to the place I was exiled to for breaking my people's laws," the Doctor said. He sounded glum. "England in the 1970s."

Sydney winced in sympathy. "Harsh."

"Well, the people aren't so bad. But the _food..." _

"Your mission succeeded," Sydney pointed out. "Maybe you'll get time off for good behaviour."

The Doctor's expression darkened. "I'd hardly count it a success, when four sentient beings died. Although I imagine that the Time Lords will care about that rather less than they will about the avoidance of a potentially embarrassing situation. Because we mustn't allow anyone to be embarrassed," he finished, his voice sharp with anger.

"Are you absolutely sure Ramos and Rambaldi died?" Sydney asked. "I mean, if there's a possibility that the Master survived, then maybe…"

The Doctor shook his head and his expression filled with a kind of wistful regret. "It's very unlikely. Ramos would have been at home in the vortex, in his energy form, but Rambaldi was as fragile as any human being, and the Master didn't succeed in separating them."

Sydney frowned. "I thought the point of plugging you into that machine was to force Ramos out of Rambaldi. You said he wouldn't have any choice."

"I did," the Doctor conceded, "and I was wrong. When the Master switched on the energy-transference device, I could feel Ramos resisting it. He shouldn't have been able to do that, yet somehow he did."

Sydney remembered how Ramos had spoken of the inevitability of his own death, and how the virtually immortal being had seemed accepting of it. She remembered, too, how the shy, lonely Milo Rambaldi had so obviously opened his heart and mind -- his soul -- to the alien.

Quietly, she said, "They shouldn't have had a choice, but they made one anyway. They shared something that was important enough to them that they could choose it."

"Yes," the Doctor agreed. He paused. "And there was something that was important enough to you, as well."

Sydney stared down into her coffee, feeling suddenly guilty. The bright, sunny day, the tourists, the people on their scooters -- this was the real world, and she'd been ready, just for a second, to unmake it for selfish reasons. "I didn't think you heard any of that."

"I wasn't completely unconscious."

She looked at him. "Why didn't you say anything? The Master almost had me convinced."

"I trusted your judgement," the Doctor said simply.

"You barely know me. We only met last night." Sydney frowned. "Well, five hundred years ago last night."

"That's the funny thing about believing the best about people. You'd be amazed how often they live up to one's expectations."

He smiled, and Sydney found herself smiling back.

"You know," she said after a second, "I never got to ask Rambaldi how he managed to make that sketch of me in his journal before he met me for the first time in the garden in the mansion. If he'd drawn it after we met, sure, but _before?_ That shouldn't have been possible."

"Well, Ramos did have a certain level of precognitive ability, remember," the Doctor said with a shrug. "Once the probability matrix collapsed to the point where your activating the Path was virtually inevitable, he would have sensed it and been able to foresee your arrival."

"So... does that mean everything that happened was -- I don't know -- _fated_, somehow?"

"Fate is not a word I particularly like." The Doctor's tone was genial, but Sydney couldn't help noticing that he hadn't exactly answered the question. She pressed on.

"You said that Ramos being on Earth was changing history, but the picture of me in Rambaldi's journal existed long before I was sent to retrieve the Path -- it existed hundreds of years before I was even born. Rambaldi _always_ died in 1496, except that the sequence of events that ended with him leaping out into the vortex started with me travelling back in time, and that hasn't even happened yet! Did anything we did change anything, or was it all going to be like that anyway?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes," Sydney insisted. "The Master tried to convince me there was a version of my life that existed before Ramos changed history, but if that version got overwritten, then it never existed in the first place to be changed. If history is always being changed, but the current version is by definition the way things have always been, does that mean that everything can be changed, or nothing can? Which one is the truth?"

"The answer is..." The Doctor stopped, and said nothing for a very long time. Sydney waited. Then he suddenly turned and looked straight at her. There was something in his eyes which seemed to go on forever. "They both are."

Sydney sighed. "You're not going to answer the question, are you?"

The Doctor only smiled as he stood up to go. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Sydney."

"Thanks for helping me get home."

He wagged a finger with mock severity. "Just don't go accidentally activating any more alien-designed Renaissance time machines, yes?"

"I promise," Sydney said, solemnly holding up a hand in a scout's salute.

He bowed to her then -- an eccentric white-haired man in a frilled shirt and an opera cape, bowing in the middle of an open-air café and attracting no attention at all from the people sitting around them. Sydney watched him walk over to the empty trattoria across the street and go inside, closing the door after him. Then she kept watching as the restaurant quietly disappeared, and the dry cleaner's and the souvenir shop slid together again to fill up the space where it had been. No one else noticed that either, and Sydney felt suddenly that she had been entrusted with a marvellous secret.

There were a lot of secrets in her life, but this one wasn't going to be a burden at all.

~ End ~


End file.
